Jewish World Review July 15, 2003 / 15 Tamuz, 5763

Laura Vanderkam

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Consumer Reports


System wastes Ph.D. brainpower


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The year after Ellen Paul earned her Ph.D. in European history from the University of Kansas, she drove a school bus to make ends meet.

She always wanted to teach at the college level, "making history meaningful to students," she says. So she spent seven years pursuing a doctorate — only to face an academic job market bleaker than a Kansas winter. After much scrounging, she found a part-time position as a lecturer at a small state school in Wisconsin. Then a one-year position in Minnesota. Then a semester gig elsewhere. None turned permanent.

Four years out, she is still searching for a full-time, tenure-track job.

Roughly 45,000 new Ph.D.s will be graduating this year, double the number from 35 years ago. Almost all believe they will turn their long, underpaid pursuit of truth into professorships — the tenured kind in which they can't be fired and can research what they spent five or more years studying. But universities, despite dangling tenured professorships like carrots to their graduate students, haven't doubled their tenure-track hiring. So, particularly in the humanities, new graduates such as Paul who want to stay in academia face years of part-time, benefitless "adjunct" positions in which they try to teach and research despite having no job security and working other jobs to pay the rent.

The world has worse tragedies than Ph.D.s driving buses. Still, this mismatch between professorships available and Ph.D.s granted is a colossal waste of brainpower sorely needed elsewhere. Universities that glut the doctorate market bear much responsibility for the situation. But graduate students aren't blameless.

These men and women have chosen to spend years training for jobs that don't exist by accruing knowledge no one will pay for. The most devoted to their passion may decide that's all right. But the "starving Ph.D." phenomenon is here to stay. Even the ivory tower can't save anyone from that reality.

Today's market mismatch began in the 1960s, when baby boomers poured into colleges, and administrators went on a hiring spree. Top Ph.D. candidates had their pick of jobs and could live the bookish version of the dream life, complete with Gothic campuses, fawning students and dusty tomes.

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Students, then and now, heard that siren song. But the hiring binge soon turned into a hangover. By the late 1970s, even top students found themselves exiled to places they never imagined. Then colleges and universities realized they could cut costs by hiring on a part-time or temporary basis. The Modern Language Association counted only 431 tenure-track English jobs landed in 2001, compared with 977 English Ph.D.s granted. One 1999 study found that only 53% of students who received their English doctorates between 1983 and 1985 were tenured professors by 1995. A mere 8% were tenured professors at "Carnegie Research I institutions" — universities with their own major doctoral programs.

All fine — if everyone knows the odds. But 51% of these English Ph.D.s took nine or more years to finish their degrees, and 95% took more than five. Would they have invested that kind of time if they had understood they had only an 8% chance of landing jobs like their professors held? One survey found only 35% of students received realistic job-placement information from their departments.

Even enlightened students, however, delude themselves into thinking they can buck the laws of supply and demand. In graduate school, they experience the rare privilege of devoting themselves fully to learning what they love while being paid a stipend, however small, to do so. Having escaped reality once, they don't expect to encounter it again.

"Most people who write their dissertations think they'll beat the odds," says Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association. "They think 'I'm meant for this,' or 'I'll be one of the ones who makes it.' " They cling to this fantasy despite the reality that in an era of budget cuts and growing disgust with tuition increases, becoming a well-paid, tenured professor is about as likely as becoming a well-paid actor.

Some graduate students do wake up. Much of the recent unionization movement can be traced to students deciding that if doctorates won't lead to good jobs, they won't put up with the low wages, high teaching loads and inadequate benefits that define most graduate programs. Students have organized at about 20 schools across the U.S. — although the movement is foundering after Yale students defeated a proposed union last month.

With or without unions, universities could improve the problem of inadequate information if they wished. Departments should warn prospective students about placement rates and encourage students to tailor their studies to existing jobs. Lori Meeks, for instance, concentrated in the expanding field of East Asian religions while studying at Princeton.

"I expected to be offered nothing," she says. Instead, she landed a tenure-track job at her first interview.

But prospective graduate students facing starving-actor odds need to think about their careers paths, too. "Those who have a gift for literature or language study should have an opportunity to pursue that gift," Feal says.

Like actors, however, humanities graduate students have to realize that — except for a few jackpot cases — there is no market for their product. When you choose a career path with no market, you have to love it enough to do it for free. Chances are, you'll do it for close to that much of the time.

Here in New York, for instance, actors wait tables, stand-up comedians hold non-funny day jobs, musicians give piano lessons and aspiring novelists crank out quizzes for Cosmo. So it goes; no one expects to follow a seven-year course and arrive. Academics, too, must choose whether they love the early works of Proust enough to drive a school bus so they can stay in academia.

Few ask that question. If they did, much of the market problem would take care of itself: These incredibly intelligent individuals would pursue careers with businesses, government agencies, secondary schools and non-profits that desperately need their brains. Instead, many of the tens of thousands of Ph.D.s graduating these next few weeks will face a reality in which they never use their degrees. A few may become big-shot professors. But aspiring academics shouldn't bank on it, or devote seven years to trying — unless they love studying so much they don't care whether the investment of time returns nothing but the privilege of devoting themselves to their work.

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Up

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02/22/03: SAT talent searches lead nowhere for many
10/08/02: Young, jobless? Skip law school, visit reality

© 2003, Laura Vanderkam